“Hola,” I said.
“Hola,” they answered in unison.
I arrived at the beautiful hundred-year-old building that had once been Dayton’s department store. The name may have changed but the stock was pretty much the same. I studied the facade. Noted the security cameras above the entrance. I tightened my grip on the bubble wrap—no one seemed to suspect anything anyway. I took a deep breath, like a diver, before moving on. The moment I was inside the doors I could feel it. The sensation of being somewhere else, that I was now part of Minneapolis’s eight square miles of indoor universe, with skyway connections. You could literally spend your whole life in there. You could be born in one of the clinics, live in one of the apartments, eat in the restaurants, go to school there, go to work in an office, get away from things in the theaters and bars. You could die in here and be laid to rest in the church that was in there somewhere. And as I was thinking that, it struck me: that I was already dead. I just hadn’t been laid to rest yet.
I crossed one of the town’s streets via a skyway and entered another region, another country.
I walked into a fast-food place and took a seat at the counter, ordered a pizza that you could see being baked inside big, red, infernal ovens. I watched the cheese melting, saw the dough rise, the slices of pepperoni sweating. I was hungry, tired. So tired that for a moment I lost concentration, lost perspective, droppedmy guard, and there it was again, the doubt: what the hell are you doing? I pulled myself together and, like I always did, gave a clear answer. Sat up straight in my chair. Looked into the security cameras mounted on the wall above the ovens.
—
“Your colleague was just here and I showed him the same pictures,” the security guard at the parking garage said.
“I see,” said Olav Hanson as he studied the pictures on the screen in front of them. The lighting and the picture quality were poor, and it had been thirty years since the last time. But he was in no doubt about it. The scars on the face. It was Lobo. He was alive. And he was here.
The phone rang. Joe Kjos.
“Yes?”
“The duty officer at MPD just called. Oz sent them a picture of Tomás Gomez at a parking garage and asked them to run a facial recognition program on every security camera in the city.”
“Shit! Fried Chicken? But the guy’s suspended from duty!”
“That’s exactly what the duty officer here just found out. So now he’s calling us and wondering what to do, who should he report it to.”
“Report what?”
“That Tomás Gomez has been spotted on a camera at a pizza restaurant at Track Plaza.”
“The shopping mall on Nicollet?”
“Yes.”
Olav Hanson signaled his thanks to the security guard and headed quickly for the door and over to the parking lot.
“Joe?”
“Yeah?”
“Give my phone number to the duty officer and tell him tokeep me posted with any updates on Gomez’s movements. Just me. Got that?”
Olav got into his car and was about to put the Kojak light on the roof when he saw a Ford pulling into the lot. It looked like one of MPD’s cars and if he wasn’t mistaken that was Kay Myers at the wheel.
“Olav…” Joe Kjos said in that slow and annoying way he had whenever he didn’t jump when Olav said jump. “I don’t want any trouble. I have to pass this on to Myers, she’s on her way out there. So the two of you can argue afterward about whose case it is.”
“Okay,” said Olav. “But give me a twenty-minute start.”
Joe hesitated. “Isn’t this something we should be calling in SWAT for?”
“Let me be the judge of that, Joe. Just give the duty officer my number and those twenty minutes. Do we have a deal?”
“But—”
“Listen, Joe. This is a coupon case. I’m calling in a coupon, okay? God knows I’ve got plenty of them, right?”
He heard Joe swallow. The coupon system was one of MPD’s unwritten rules. In short it meant that if you covered for a colleague—and that could be anything from a minor breach of the rules to something serious—then you had a coupon you could call in next time you needed a favor.
“Twenty minutes,” said Joe Kjos and hung up.
